Computer games to die for

The notion of people getting totally hooked on Bejeweled or Candy Crush or other phone app games must’ve seemed like a no-brainer to Stephen King when coming up with ‘End of Watch.’

I t’s perhaps not a stretch to imagine Stephen King one day sitting in his local Maine coffeehouse and noticing that people have gotten pretty darned fixated on their cellphone games. Like, scarily fixated. The notion of people getting literally hooked on Bejeweled or Candy Crush or other phone apps must’ve seemed like a no-brainer for King, who has never been one to overlook a good cultural phenomenon.

That’s the basis of his latest novel, End of Watch, which concludes a trilogy of detective fiction featuring retired cop Bill Hodges, and — just in time for Halloween reading — adds a supernatural twist to a story about the real dangers of teen suicide.

That’s an issue that has affected even Philippine families,

and King’s latest looks at the matter from a typically macabre perspective — embedded in a detective tale about a maniacal killer bent on telling teens they have no reason to live.

Hodges and his younger partners in detecting, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, return to find out what’s causing a spike in suicides. In their first installment together ( Mr. Mercedes), Hodges went through hell and back to track down a killer who used a stolen Mercedes-Benz to commit mass murder; then he stopped an obsessed literary fan from wiping out a family to recover prized notebooks from a literary genius ( Finders Keepers). He ended that installment with a tantalizing epilogue: the killer from the first book, Brady Hartsfield, though seem- ingly incapacitated in a state hospital after a brain injury, is more alert than we thought. And Hodges’ cop instincts tell him the case ain’t closed yet.

In End of Watch, it turns out Brady — one of King’s more compelling villains — has gotten his mind wrapped around an evil plan to inflict maximum damage on those who put him in the hospital. Physically incapacitated — “gorked out,” by all appearances — Brady is quietly hatching elaborate revenge plans against Hodges.

Hodges — now running a private detective agency called Finders Keepers — is called back into action by a former cop partner after a woman kills herself and her quadriplegic daughter (a victim of the rampaging Mercedes in the first book). On the scene is an old-fashioned Gameboy-type device called a Zappit — outdated and defunct, it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing an 80-year-old suicidal woman would have lying around.

Something’s fishy to Hodges. And in this case, that’s literally true.

Brady’s master plan involves a game demo on the Zappit called Fishin’ Hole — the kind of mindless distracting game that people play on their phones every day to kill time in traffic. But this one has a hypnotic effect: a visual of swimming fish that kills more than time — it’s a portal through which subliminal messages can be sent. Messages that get people thinking about all sorts of things, including suicide, which happens to be Brady’s macabre preoccupation.

Zappits start appearing in the hands of young people, usually troubled teens who might have doubts about their worth in the big scheme of things, and who might find the idea of suicide somehow romantic or appealing. As usual, King burrows deep into the premise, though keeping it all in the service of an airport thriller with a swiftly-moving plot, a few pointed observations on modern culture, and an unsettling focus on people’s addictions — whether it’s drugs, games, their own fame and fortune, or other unsavory diversions.

Inserted in the mystery is a tacit warning about suicidal thoughts among teens — they can take root with little nudging, and are helped along by online websites containing comment threads that reaffirm teens’ worst ideations. Hodges, experiencing a grave medical diagnosis in End of Watch that has him waxing philosophical, has this to say about it:

The thought that comes to him is too complicated — too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow — to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

Hodges, an easygoing retiree, nonetheless has nagging doubts about his own life and the people his actions have affected. He’s a good everyman: we can relate to Hodges, with his chronic health concerns and occasional desire to burrow deep inside a case and tinker away. It’s not quite a “cozy mystery” (cozy mystery writers rarely revel in gore the way King does), but it’s a cozy character, nonetheless.

In Brady Hartsfield, King has spawned a memorably evil character, yet at his core he’s a bumbler, an epic fail: his earlier plan to blow up a concert hall full of boy band fans ended with him getting whapped upside the head with a sock full of ball bearings; here, his early attempts to inspire suicide are almost comically ineffectual. Yet he’s a patient man, full of bad ideas.

For those keeping score, the theme of technology running amok has been one of King’s perennials — whether it’s Maximum Overdrive, an early story about ordinary household devices inflicting mayhem on mankind for no apparent reason; or Christine, about a deadly vintage automobile and its owner; or Cell, about cell phones that cause their users to become homicidal maniacs. ( Cell phones and their attendant distractions are a recurring source for his horror instinct: here, it’s an annoying ring tone that gets his goat.)

On the other hand, mind control is another of King’s favorites — whether it’s the evil green beings in Tommyknockers, Jack Torrence’s possession by demonic forces in The Shining, or the machinations of a corrupt smalltown selectman in Under the Dome, the various ways people’s brains can be infiltrated, used and led around has fascinated the horror writer.

There are things here that smash the trusty old detective genre all to pieces — after two novels set very much in the real world of clues and chasing suspects, King perhaps couldn’t resist getting a little Carrie on us all once again. And the ideas seem borrowed from scifi B-movies — stuff like The Hidden (a little-seen Kyle MacLachlan gem from the ‘90s) and the Denzel Washington serial killer flick Fallen.

Still, how King manages to revisit similar ground in so many of his novels and yet remain eminently readable — a real page-turner — is a mystery. It must come down to the slip-easy writing, and his investment in characters we feel we know, even if they’re basically hodgepodges of character tics and quirks we see in people all around us.

Let’s hope he keeps picking up on the world’s annoying habits for years more to come.